All posts tagged ‘Amazon Prime’

Last night I watched re-runs of Downton Abbey while I took down my Christmas tree — don’t judge me, I know how far into January we are. I became addicted to the show in the week before my second son was born. I languished in bed clutching my stomach thanking God for PBS and Amazon Prime. So I, along with the rest of America. have waited patiently for season three. Unlike most of America however, I am choosing to wait an extra day each week.

I have become accustomed to watching shows in my own time, on whatever device I choose, I enjoy being able to pause and make a cup of tea at will. My husband purchased me a Roku HD Streaming Player for Christmas and so has further enabled this perk of mine. I keep up to date on Hulu with the shows that I love, two of which air on Sunday night, Downton Abbey and Once Upon a Time. Each week I wonder what is coming up, and each week I say I can’t wait, but I do, one, often two more days.

Back in October I lamented the loss of my Prime membership under the Amazon Mom program. Never mind, I’ve been surviving without Prime, and the discounts offered by Amazon Mom are still fantastic. My diapers come every two months with a heavy discount that beats even the best in-store sale, and I love not having to add them to my grocery list. So I remained a vocal fan of the program.

Until I sat down at my computer last night to check my email.

Beginning on January 24th, Amazon are making two changes to the program that I find appalling.

Firstly, whereas previously you could earn up to a year’s worth of free prime membership by making qualifying purchases, now no matter what you buy from Amazon you lose it after three months unless you pay the annual fee. The kicker for me though, a mom who let the Prime lapse after a year, is that Amazon is pulling it’s discount on diapers and wipes if you don’t pay for Prime at the end of the free trial period.

What began as an amazing service for moms, allowing us to get discounts without clipping coupons or driving from store to store, has become another way for Amazon to make money at the expense of goodwill. Moms who enjoyed the service for the small amount of freedom it granted them, who enjoyed not having to cost check diapers in every store, moms on a budget who don’t want to pay a yearly fee for a previously free program.

To me this has the scent of Amazon’s idea last year to offer a discount to readers who, using their phone, scanned in a book at a local bookstore but bought it from Amazon instead. I have always been a big fan of Amazon, I even encouraged my employer to set up a corporate account and spend tens of thousands of dollars with them, but now it seems that step by step they are becoming a company I could easily loathe.

This Amazon mom will be going local for even more products in the future.

The first time I played with an iPad, all I could think of was Neal Stephenson’s post-cyberpunk masterpiece, The Diamond Age. Subtitled “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” the novel tells the story of a girl more or less raised by an intricately engineered interactive computer in the guise of a book. The Primer, a nanotech marvel, is far more sophisticated than the tablet computers of 2011—but when you flick around the intuitive operating systems of today’s tablets and smartphones, you can see the Primer on the horizon.

It’s funny—in the days leading up to its arrival, I assumed I’d have a lot to say about the Kindle Fire when it finally came. What happened instead is that the Fire simply inserted itself into my daily life in a manner so seamless I had little to say about it. It was as if I’d had one all along.

In a way, I had: My chief impression of the Kindle Fire so far is that it’s like my (much-loved) Android smartphone, only bigger. (My phone, for the curious, is a Samsung Epic: Trixie to her friends.) The Fire’s gorgeous display and easy navigation puts me on familiar ground. It’s heavier than I expected, a solid weight in my hand. It’s about the same size as my Kindle, but thicker, and of course the whole thing is screen. No keyboard. A glossy black screen, a rubbery-feeling back. It’s book-sized, which I love.

My already-smudged Kindle Fire and my battered, sunfaded copy of The Diamond Age—a book you should totally read, if you haven't already.

The tech sites have been overflowing with detailed reviews of the Kindle Fire’s specs and performance. What I always want to know, when I’m reading device reviews, is: how are you using it? On a practical level, I mean. What are you doing with it throughout your day? What apps do you use, enjoy, rely on?

So far, my answer to those questions is: reading books, mostly. Actually, I’m reading on it more than I expected to. See, I love my regular Kindle’s easy-on-the-eyes e-ink display, and I especially love its lack of internet distractions. Sure, I can check my mail on the Kindle, but the pokey browser and monochrome display render internet activity helpfully unappealing. I’ve seen it as a plus that I’m not tempted to flick away from a novel to take a peek at Twitter, the way I’m tempted if I’m reading a book on my phone.

Well, on the Kindle Fire, web-browsing, blog-reading, and mail-checking are even easier (and prettier) than on my phone. But so far, I’m most enchanted by the Fire as an e-reader. The regular Kindle still beats it for daytime, sunlit reading. For reading in bed at night, the Fire is my new best friend: that’s when backlighting becomes a plus. The 7-inch screen is much better for book-reading than my phone, but not so big that it’s bulky or uncomfortable. (The iPad has always struck me as too large for comfy curling up in bed. But I don’t have one, so I could be wrong.) On the Fire, as on the iPod Touch or an Android smartphone, you turn pages with a tap of the thumb, which is even easier than pressing the Kindle’s page-turn button.

Comics look AMAZING on the Fire—just like they do on the iPad. Backlit comics are utterly luminous; it’s like this is the medium comics wanted to be all along. If only they weren’t so darned expensive ($2.99-3.99 a pop). I downloaded a free issue of Tiny Titans via the Comixology app just to see what comics would be like on this device, and all of us—kids, hubby, me—were blown away by how beautiful the panels looked. And the size was fairly comfortable, to my surprise. I still think the iPad is a better comics reader due to its larger size. The Fire is just a bit too small for ideal comics-reading if you struggle with small print the way I do. Sure, you can enlarge the panels, but that’s a pain.

Amazon has trumpeted the Fire’s video-viewing capabilities. Of course we were eager to try this feature out. You certainly can’t beat the convenience: The trip from Home screen to the opening frame of Arrested Development (free via my Amazon Prime membership) took less than fifteen seconds (I counted fourteen Mississippis) and the picture quality was stunning.

If the image quality is this good in a photo taken with my beat-up camera, imagine how much better it looks in real life.

Playing videos outside Prime has been less satisfactory; my husband and I are trying to catch up on Season 5 of The Guild, and there’s been a fair amount of lag and stuttering.

As for games, naturally we had to download Angry Birds—the official gadget rite of initiation. Again, the quality of the graphics made us all go oooh. The kids asked for Bejeweled, too. That’s all we’ve tried so far—suggestions welcome! Of course you know a Glitch app is at the top of my wish list.

A couple of Fire negatives:

• Typing on the screen keyboard is ponderous because it doesn’t have Swype. And honestly, this is messing me up. The Fire looks and acts so much like my smartphone that my brain cannot seem to wrap itself around the tedious reality of key-tapping on this thing. Swype is so much faster, easier, better in every way. Without Swype, how will I tweet?

• Occasionally the operating system seems to hang. I’ll push the browser’s back arrow, for example, and nothing will happen. Sometimes it takes an extra tap or two to get a response.

I’ll be interested to see what role the Kindle Fire settles into in our home. What I’m really eager to experiment with are good apps for kids—digital books, games, educational apps, etc. If you’ve got favorites, leave me a comment!

This morning Amazon officially announced its much-awaited Android-based tablet, the Kindle Fire. The big news is that at $199, it’s half the price of the cheapest iPad and nearly as cheap as the $149 TouchPads that went flying off shelves when HP discontinued support last month.

The Kindle Fire will have a 7″ display ready for instant access to Amazon’s growing Android app store, as well as its library of streaming movies and shows, which as of this week includes a deal for Fox content. It also comes with a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime. Having had Prime for several years, I can say that it is increasingly well-worth its $79/year price. Because Prime also gives you free (and commercial-free) access to 11,000 movies and TV shows, it’s even more worthwhile if you get a Fire.

Some anticipated that $79 subscription would come with the Fire. Instead you get free Amazon Cloud storage.

“Kindle Fire brings together all of the things we’ve been working on at Amazon for over 15 years into a single, fully-integrated service for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “With Kindle Fire, you have instant access to all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, [and] the convenience of Amazon Whispersync.”

According to the Kindle Fire’s press release, its digital content selection will include “100 exclusive graphic novels, including Watchmen, which has never before been available in digital format, as well as Batman: Arkham City, Superman: Earth OneGreen Lantern: Secret Origin and 96 others from DC Entertainment.”

On the down side, there’s no 3G connectivity in the Fire, unlike the Kindle, which has been my savior when traveling. Phone not working in the middle of a conference in Paris? Battery-eating phone suddenly dead in Boston? Either way, I can whip out my Kindle with its practically never-ending battery life, and I’ve got my email, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the web ready to go in black-and-white eInk with no monthly fee, just eternal 3G.

Speaking of battery life, the Kindle Fire is expected to last seven hours on WiFi. It’s got 8 GB of storage (compared to the 16 GB or 32 GB of the aforementioned cheap TouchPads) and a 1 GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, Amazon also announced a new set of Kindles in a product line that already accounts for 10% of Amazon’s revenue–more than $6 billion. And two of the three are a drop in price from the previous least-expensive Kindle, which was $114:

The next generation of the Kindle–$79

New touchscreen Kindle Touch–$99

Shipping November 21, Kindle Touch 3G with the free 3G like existing Kindles–$149

The $79 Kindle will be 30% lighter (fewer than 6 ounces) and 18% smaller–Amazon is calling it the “Kindle that fits in your pocket,” although with a 6″ display, I think they have larger pockets than I do.

They’ll also have X-Ray, a new feature that lets customers explore the “bones of the book.” With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia.

The new Kindles, unlike the old ones, come with what Amazon calls “special offers and sponsored screensavers”–ads that appear when you’re not reading. There will also be offers from AmazonLocal, their daily deal service.